The current study investigated the role of theory of mind development in school readiness among 120 low-income preschool and kindergarten children. A short-term longitudinal design was used to examine relations among theory of mind, the understanding of teaching, and learning behaviors and their collective role in children's literacy and numeracy…

There is growing consensus regarding the effectiveness of active-learning pedagogies in college science courses. Less is known about ways that student-level factors contribute to positive outcomes in these contexts. The present study examines students' (N = 245) trust in the instructor--defined as perceptions of their instructor's understanding,…

Children frequently select learning sources based on epistemic cues, or cues pertaining to informants' knowledge. Previous research has shown that preschoolers preferentially learn from informants who have been accurate in the past, appear confident, or have had visual access to relevant information. The present series of studies aimed to…

Educators' beliefs are powerful, affecting not only their pedagogical practices, but also student efficacy and success. The academic achievement of any particular student may rely greatly on whether the teacher believes that student has the ability to succeed. This article affirms the imperative for administrators and educators to spend time…

Various arguments are reviewed about the claim that language development is critically connected to the development of theory of mind. The different theories of how language could help in this process of development are explored. A brief account is provided of the controversy over the capacities of infants to read others' false beliefs. Then the…

Language is of vital importance to human beings. It is a means of communication and it has specific cognitive links. Advanced social cognition is necessary for children to acquire language, and sophisticated mind-reading abilities to assume word meanings and communicate pragmatically. Language can be defined as a bi-directional system that permits…

In recent years, there has been increasing research interest in the development of theory of mind (ToM) in deaf children and young people and the conditions which might enable or suppress development of the set of skills involved. However, the views of practitioners working with deaf children have not been widely explored. This paper presents the…

Theory of Mind (ToM), as a relevant aspect in children's socio-cognitive development, has been widely studied. Some results have suggested that bilingual children have an advantage over their monolingual peers in development of ToM. However, there is less research regarding the predictive role of ToM in performance of oral and reading…

This review article starts with an overview of changing education paradigms and the literature on cognitive and linguistic relationships in imaginative play related to comprehension of oral and written texts. Strategies for developing the cognitive and linguistic foundations for text comprehension through play are described. A review of current…

The year 2016 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of John McGahern (born 1934), the widely acclaimed Irish author. There is a shared temper of mind and several common strands in the work of McGahern and that of the English philosopher, Michael Oakeshott (1900-1990). Despite the very different cultural environments in which they grew up and…

This study aimed to examine the presence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in a sample of female adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) during the acute phase of illness. We also compare the level of autistic traits, social perception skills and obsessive-compulsive symptoms in four groups: AN, ASD, and two gender- and age-matched control groups.…

In everyday life, we use folk theories about the mind and behavior to understand ourselves and others. An important part of our folk theory of mind is our intuitions about the role of the self in mental functioning--namely, whether the self is able to control each mental operation. The current study explored beliefs about the nature of control…

Why do individuals with more autistic traits experience social difficulties? Here we examined the hypothesis that these difficulties stem in part from a challenge in understanding social acting, the prosocial pretense that adults routinely produce to maintain positive relationships with their ingroup. In Study 1, we developed a self-administered…

Substitute object pretense is one of the earliest-developing forms of pretense, and yet it changes considerably across the preschool years. By 3.5 years of age, children can pretend with substitutes that are highly dissimilar from their intended referents (Elder & Pederson, 1978), but even older children have difficulty understanding such…

Adults often attribute internal dispositions to other people and down-play situational factors as explanations of behavior. A few studies have addressed the origins of this proclivity, but none has examined emotions, which rank among the more important dispositions that we attribute to others. Two experiments (N = 270) explored 15-month-old…